A key focus of this blog is the history of Jacksons in Ireland. I am specially curious about those who may be related to Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). His life is key to understanding how a dozen or so young men, sons of Irish tenant farmers, shaped the future of international banking in the Far East in the late 1800s. I also use this blog as a place for playful posts: book and restaurant reviews, recipes, and events in my life. WARNING: Note the date of each post. Some may be outdated.

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Monday, December 24, 2012

Every year on the first Sunday of Advent, Andreas & I create
a wreath, and then later that day we light the first candle, at supper-time. Over the next three
Sundays, we light one more candle to join the first, and then the second, the
third, and the fourth. On Christmas Day, the final candle in the middle is also
lit. By then, the candle that kicked off the season has usually burnt down to
not much more than a stub, but the light in the centre is now the one that burns bright. Not a bad
metaphor.

Boughs scavenged from local trees that needed pruning.

When our children were small, we had a couple of friends,
Reg & Ellen, who offered their pottery kiln to us. The children and I would
play with clay, and over time we made enough pieces to people a Christmas crèche.
We used small, metal, funnel-tips, the kind that go onto the end of the bag
used for icing cakes, to create the patterns on the Wise Mens' cloaks. On the
first Sunday in Advent, the Wise Men and shepherds would be placed on the other
side of the living room from where the crèche was. Over the next four weeks
they inched closer. On Christmas morning, the baby Jesus would appear – not before.

30 years old, and hokey as heck - but it is ours.

These days, I am bit lazy about all that. The crèche and all
gets unpacked and goes up at the same time - which is whenever we can make the time. We seem to need to pace ourselves a bit more than we used to. Maybe we should always have done
that, but our bodies back then were the equivalent of jet planes and we could
heedlessly cover great distances at ear-popping speeds. Now, we travel through
life in the equivalent of Greyhound. All is good.

If you look closely, you might notice that there is a
distinct absence of sheep in our crèche. I never could do sheep, except in the
form of ginger-port-marinated lamb and such. That I can do. Also you might
notice that one of our Wise Men has boobs. The way I see it is that since the
Bible doesn’t mention how many Wise Men there were, we may as well riff on
gender as well. Our wise woman is modeled after Margaret Laurence, my eldest
daughter’s godmother. She died far too young, younger than I am now.

Over the years, some of our crèche people have lost their hands,
or had to have their heads glued back on again. Even the angel. The greatest amount
of damage happened the year I placed the box of clay figurines on a rocking chair
when I was in the midst of packing things away. I added the camel, and that was
the tipping point. Literally.

Andreas glued all the broken bits back together, so there
they still are today, some of them handless, some with glue marks on their necks,
but all still in the crèche that he built just as he built much of the two
houses that sheltered us for the past four decades.

I haven’t even touched on our various Xmas food traditions, so I will leave that aspect for other posts, maybe even another year. Pacing myself. There is one more tradition though that does
not involve food and is also worth mentioning before I close, mostly because we just did
it again a few days ago.

For the past three decades, our celebration of Christmas has
included an onslaught of recorder playing. Onslauight is the operative word. Sometimes the
assembled Schroederians and their offspring finish off a particular Mennonite Christmas carol
on the same note. Sometimes not. Regardless of the outcome, it is always declared to
be an instance of brilliant harmony, or an inspired atonal variant. We
always win. In my books, that’s the kind of winning that is a good note
to end on.

So, Merry Christmas. Lashings ofabundant good health, love, and joy for all in the year to come.

Chris, on piano, sheepdogged us through it all once again - in spite of a sudden onset of what turned out to be strep throat. Ah, yes. Tis the Season for flu and such ....

A sign of our nomadic but digitally connected times - one family contingent was Skyped in from Prince George. Occasionally, the baby appeared thunderstruck. Understandable.

Monday, December 10, 2012

The first of three pages of a newsclipping saved in a scrapbook at HSBC London archives.

Flibbertigibbetis a label that
would best describe me when I am in the act of committing much of my research. I
often flit from here to there all the while exhibiting a distinct lack of
focus. Hopefully I will fare better than the Flibbertigibbet of mythical times who
so exasperated his master that he was thrown down a hill. He then rolled into a
valley, and was transformed into a stone. Anyway, back to me. As per usual, I
set out to do one thing this morning and ended up doing quite another.

My initial plan had been to edit and then to post the second
part of my talk to the Hong Kong branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, but I got
distracted by a storythat was a small part of the talk. Thomas Jackson’ had a routine of doffing a soft hat, and performing a wee dance with his cane as he
entertained dignitaries at banquets with his version of The Wearing O’ the Green. I then recalled other musical
entertainments in Hong Kong, most particularly the airs played at a banquet
held in Jackson’s honour when he prepared to leave in 1902 for England. The
banquet was chaired by Ho
Tung as a representative of the local Chinese merchants.

An aside: One of my life’s regrets is that I do not touch-type. When I
was a student in the early 1960s, the choice was between Physics and Typing. I
chose Physics merely because there were three girls in Physics and the rest
were all boys, while there were only two boys in Typing. I was fifteen years
old, what can I say? The odds in Physics looked good to me.

I mention this only because in spite of being a somewhat
flighty sort of researcher, I decided to transcribe nine pages worth of that 1902
news clipping before I finished my next blog piece. Thankfully, there is such a
thing as voice recognition software, albeit with warts and all. I mention this
because I may have missed some of the decidedly odd errors that such software
can be counted on making. For example, Masterman
Bank came out as: Masterman spanked. I did catch that error, although since the
bank was soon bankrupted, the voice recognition may have been channeling the
sentiments of the creditors.

But enough of all that. The news clipping is now transcribed
in its entirety, and is posted to my web site (link beneath). At some point I
will take the time to properly annotate it. The dozens of names mentioned are
daunting to individually research – even for a professional flibbertigibbet such as The Moi –
so they will have to wait. Even without such annotations, the piece is still worth
a read.

The early 1900s concerns about currency standards and the balance
of trade between China and other nations are still with us today. Plus ça change. I guess Thomas Jackson
didn’t fix that one for us. That being said, the sanitation issues mentioned in
the speeches were addressed in his lifetime, and in some measure thanks to men
like him. Today, Hong Kong is one of the cleanest cities in the world, if not the cleanest. Also, going by the great
gushes of water which I recently saw being used to hose down sidewalks in Hong
Kong, I would guess that the issue of water shortages constraining trade was also
solved, in spite of the fact that the Chinese merchants were fretting that Thomas
Jackson with his “good joss” was about to leave the Colony.

In this article, Jackson was referred to as the outspoken
member of the Legislative Council. That is a nice little insight into how
he conducted himself there, a nicety that is rarely revealed by simply reading
the minutes of meetings. Clearly he was not a wilting violet. Also, it is
interesting the extent to which acts of personal kindness keep being mentioned
by members of a number of communities, in this and other such tributes. I had
already documented evidence of this generosity of spirit towards his Irish
neighbours and extended family, so it is not surprising to see evidence of it
also in Hong Kong.

Another bit that intrigued me was Ho Tung’s take on the legislature’s impact on
prosperity:

No one who is even superficially acquainted with the history of Hongkong
can ignore the fact that you Thomas Jackson] took over this very responsible office at a time of greatest doubt and
uncertainty attending the commercial affairs of the young Colony. Although
blame was sought to be saddled on the executive on account of the legislative
measures which it enacted for the depressing state of affairs, it cannot be
denied that far more potent factors throughout the East were contributing to
bring commercial disaster upon Hongkong. The vicissitudes of banking, like all
other trades, became apparent in the reports and balance sheets issued by our
local bank at this time. The carping criticisms which its detractors leveled at
it were unmeasured and unrestrained.

There is also a reference to the Savings Bank in the article, a bank which
was started under Thomas Jackson’s watch. It was designed to serve the needs of
small depositors, ones who at that time did not have access to the kind of
chequing privileges that we take for granted today. It nearly got derailed
because Governor Bowen and got into a tiff with the Colonial Office. In the
end, the ordinance to set up the bank was passed and seven months later it had
already received $50,000 in deposits. Once again, this is another success to
chalk up in part to Thomas Jackson and his gift for calming troubled waters.

One phrase in the article that I particularly liked is when Jackson
describes the main part of his philanthropic contributions as: beggar-in-chief. Also, he says that if
he could choose one word for his feelings upon leaving, it would be thankfulness. Finally, Jackson’s trust
in my word is my bond – the handshake
style of financial contracts that he had grown up with as a son of an Irish farmer
– clearly stood him in good stead with the oral contracts that were the norm in
Hongkong at this time. He went so far as to state: I maintain that a Chinaman's word is better than his bond.

As for why I cared about the Irish airs played at the
banquet – I will save that aspect of the article for the next post. After all,
that was the part of the next post that derailed me into this sideways step. The
story of these airs belongs with the story of The Wearing O’ the Green.It may become a separate post.

Friday, December 7, 2012

I received several emails from people who were unable to
attend my talk at the Royal Asiatic Society in Hong Kong in November, so I promised
to publish parts of it in future blogs. This is the first installment.

In the late 1840s, a gypsy in Creggan Parish, Co. Armagh
prophesied the future of two men: one of them the future Sir Thomas Jackson
[aka TJ], the other a Mr. Mauleverer. One of them would die a dastardly death and one of them would be
known all over the world. This is one
of those instances where truth is stranger than fiction. For the full story of the murder of Mauleverer
and its consequences see the link to my website article: The Murder of
Mauleverer.

The parents of TJ and of several other future Hongkong Shanghai
Bank employees - employees who emigrated to Hong Kong from Ireland in the mid to late
1800s - were named at the trial for Mauleverer’s murder. None of them were
suspects, but they were noted as jurymen, neighbours, farmers, or
policemen. As a result of their interconnections, this murder had an echo
effect on the future of Hong Kong that bears thinking about.

TJ himself was born in 1841, the same year that another
Irishman, Pottinger, signed the deed that made Hong Kong a British colony. Pottinger
was the first of eight
Hong Kong Governors of Irish ancestry who served in TJ’s lifetime. Every
one of these Irishmen was marked in some way by crop failures in their homeland.
For many of them, it was the aftermath of the Great Famine that had propelled them
to emigrate in the first place.

One interesting sidebar is that most small farmers in Creggan
at the time of the Great Famine farmed between an acre and an acre and a half -
barely enough to keep body and soul together. This was coincidentally the same kind
of acreage that most farmers in Canton farmed. Just as in Ireland, these
Cantonese farmers experienced calamitous crop failures combined with unjust and
dysfunctional land ownership systems. And if that coincidence is not enough,
one of the key crops that failed in Canton was also the potato. I am dying to
learn more about this.

I read recently that blog posts should not exceed 500 words.
Gadzooks. Now that I have proved to
myself that I can actually complete a post that comes in under the 500 word
wire – and it isn’t just a Martini
recipe - I shall revert to my old evil ways. The next post will definitely
exceed this miserly limit.

Also let’s be clear. The only reason that this post is so
short is that most of the material has been punted offsite to three links, one
to my website and two to previous blogs. This is cheating, I know, but I trust
that it works. Less than 500 words. Done. (If you don't count captions & photos.)

Thanks to Bill Greaves who is doing the intro. Hedid the spade work to make this talk possible.

About Me

Author And Researcher. I am currently writing a book on the life of Sir Thomas Jackson. He was the son of tenant farmers, born just before the Famine in South Armagh, who was knighted because he not only lead HSBC into the 20th Century, but was also responsible for assisting with the funding of much of the economic development in China & Japan in the late 1800s. My first published book was "Some Become Flowers: Living with Dying at Home".